Stories from the Past

Today I'm gonna do a little research and tell you just a little bit more about myself.

I am somewhat certain I have a fear of cracks. I have felt this since. . . one or two summers ago? It all started with buying a pair of flip flops that weren't too durable for their price. The color sorta flaked off and it had cracks all over. I didn't want my feet anywhere near those things because it just felt so EW. I still had to wear them though, as reluctant as I was.

Then this summer, the one of the toilet seats in my house broke. It has a crack on it that pinches your butt when you sit on it, but that's another thing. It's the sight of it that makes my skin crawl. It looks like this:

I DON'T LIKE IT.

And once we were driving home after some rain, but it stopped raining. There was this small hill of dirt and pebbles with a bunch of fairly big paths that the rain had carved out. It sort of looked like this:

NO THANKS.

I guess now that I look back on it, it's just three different things with (barely) one thing in common, and that is a cracked surface. I get goosebumps thinking about these images, let alone searching for them on Google!

So time for the research part. First of all, is it a phobia? They say there can be a phobia of anything. I'm not sure if I'm necessarily scared of these images, just uncomfortable. I can deal with these images, I guess. I don't like dealing with them, but I do. Maybe it's not a severe case. According to the first webpage I searched for, I don't get any of the panic attack-like symptoms, but I do get anxious. So I don't really have an answer for ya.

And let's say it is a phobia, what is it called? The closest I think I could find was a thing called trypophobia. It's unofficially called the "revulsion or disgust of objects with irregular patterns of holes". I'm not really petrified with clustered holes. Edited photos that show human skin littered with dark holes make me feel bad, but really, who wouldn't? Human skin? With a bunch of big, dark holes? Ummm, no.

It mostly just cracks I'm repulsed by. Certain cracks, too. Cracks in the road? I'm fine. I basically break my mother's back all the time. The cracks plumbers are often made fun for? I don't like them, but again, no one does. And if you're wondering, I did not have some harrowing childhood experience where a few cracks nearly killed me.

If you have this "phobia", tell me. If you have some psychologist in your family or something, show them this blogpost and tell them to create an official name for this thing. Or tell them to name a new phobia after me since it sounds pretty one-in-a-kind. Jazphobia? Lynphobia? Whatever, I'm cool. And the definition could say

The revulsion or disgust of flip flops, toilet seats, and dirt hills with cracks and/or irregular patterns. Symptoms include goosebumps and icky feelings.